Automatic Home Demolition is Resuming!!

[dspguy]

The stupidest thing of all - and proof 100% it's naught but a money grab - is that demo will be running on Materia too.

Most wards are empty here. And - it's a known fact they control the demo at a region level as a minimum.

This has NOTHING to do with freeing up houses as much as "Oh subscriptions and cash shop are dropping, we need to have more money for 16, demo all the OCE houses!"


That will just make our servers look even emptier and drive more people off. Yet another bone-headed bit of idiocy to drive people away from an entire datacentre -- We need wards that look like there is housing in it, removing houses from Materia and putting in empty plots is just dumbness to the 16th degree.

I've been saying that for years. Consider that there are something like 80 servers now, for every player that owns a house, SE has a near-guaranteed $13/mo. 80 servers x 5 districts x 24 wards x 2 subdivisions x 30 plots per = 576,000 plots. That's nearly $7.5M per month that they can count on. When they add another 6 wards, that's $9.3M per month if they all sell out. $112M per year - just from subs that are pretty much locked in.

Of course, many of these players would be subbed regardless if they have a house or not since they are full-time players, but I personally think that subs wax and wane based on the content cycle. Only some small fraction actually sub/unsub based on the content cycle and another small fraction will unsub for ~40 days and then resub to keep their house. In either case, they are guaranteed $100M/year just from how they managed housing and by keeping auto-demolition part of their policy.

If you believe the figures out there from some sources, the operating income from FFXIV was about $500 million. So, $100 million from "locked-in subs" is significant. I'm one of those "locked-in players." I lost my house once during the first purge back in 2015/2016 and was lucky to get a medium about a year after I returned. My wife really lucked out and picked up a large in a black market deal gone wrong and she just happened to walk by and see an available large. Considering how we'd likely never see a medium or large again given the current system, when we take a break from the game, we could manage 5 months of sub to keep the houses open for a year. But when we take breaks, it is usually only for 3-5 months. For example, we'd resub on January 1. Play through to January 30th (reopen the house). Resub once just to keep the house (March 12th or so) and reopen the house again around April 12th. And then resub and actually play in mid-May.

Not ideal and they get $13 extra. Just to keep digital real estate. But my wife find great joy in her house so it is worth the money to keep it open even during the short hiatus that we take.